The week in wildlife – in pictures

The week in wildlife – in pictures

Blue-tailed bee-eaters, beavers and fighting squirrels are among the pick of this week’s images from the natural world

Fri 3 Oct 2014 12.02 EDT
Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 13.07 EST

About 45,800 migratory pink-footed geese arrived at Lancashire’s WWT Martin Mere Wetland Centre, beating previous record of 36,000 in 2010. Over the next couple of weeks, more birds will make the 500 mile journey from Iceland to spend the start of winter in Lancashire to rest and refuel, before leaving for south.

Blue-tailed bee-eaters (
Merops philippinuses) are seen in Qiaojia county of Zhaotong city in Yunnan, China. The blue-tailed bee eater, which mainly breeds in southeastern Asia, is marked out by its colourful feathers.

This beaver family is so used to Bettina and Christian Kutschenreiter from Rosenheim near Munich, Germany, that they recognise their voices and let them take close-up shots. Perhaps understandable as the Kutschenreiter have been visiting them for 10 years since they first interrupted them taking pictures of kingfishers.

A sparrowhawk (left) harrasses a Eurasian jay bird in Dalen, Norway. Roy Mangersnes captured these stunning images. He said the sparrowhawks descend on the grounds where jays are fed by a friend every year. ‘As many as 8-10 hawks charge the jays who dodge them as if dodging bullets, and they seem to be very good at it.’

A black-footed ferret peeks out of a tube after being brought to a ranch near Williams, Arizona. The release of 25 ferrets on the Espee ranch marks one of the first reintroductions of the endangered species on private land in the US.

Cormorant birds under the old eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge in San Francisco. Transportation officials are trying to move hundreds of double-crested cormorants and other birds that nest in the 10,000ft-long steel structure.

An adult female Orsini’s viper (
Vipera ursinii), an endangered species, in Abruzzo, Italy.
Eleven populations of snakes have declined sharply and 8 of these across UK, France and Italy have declined by over 50% between 1990 and 2009 . The exact cause is unknown but likely factors are loss of habitat and prey.

A
haul of illegal manta ray gills confiscated in a seafood restaurant in Surabiya, Indonesia. The restaurant owner, one of four illegal trader, was arrested and faces a maximum fine of $ 25,000 and possible prison sentence.

Thousands of Pacific walrus come ashore near Point Lay, Alaska. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration counted 35,000 during their survey. The shrinking of Arctic ice due of climate change is making walrus vulnerable and affecting marine ecosystems and wildlife depending on the Arctic habitat.

A dinner-plate sized Tasmanian cave spider in a cave at Mole Creek in Tasmania, Australia. Filmmakers Joe Shemesh and Doug Thost have spent months in dark, wet Tasmanian caves recording the lives of the shy and light-sensitive spider for Sixteen Legs, a documentary on the prehistoric spider.

Vultures feed on left-over meat from a restaurant at Victoria Falls Safari Lodge near Zambezi national park in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Vulture-feeding is a unique tourist experience offered by the lodge since 1990s. More than 100 vultures in the park swoop down on the meat put in an open ground just in front of the lodge’s restaurant.

Monarch butterflies fill the frame in this snap taken at a site in Mexico. The butterflies migrate from the US and Canada to Mexico for the winter. A study by researcher Marcus Kronforst of the University of Chicago, published in Nature, suggests the species started out in North America 2 million years ago, not South or Central America.